Moderato Cantabile [Seven Days… Seven Nights] *** (1960, Jeanne Moreau, Jean-Paul Belmondo) – Classic Movie Review 12,910

Jeanne Moreau won the Best Actress award at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival for director Peter Brook’s 1960 French drama film Moderato Cantabile [Seven Days… Seven Nights], based on Marguerite Duras’s popular 1958 novel.

Jeanne Moreau stars as unstable Anne Desbarèdes, who is married to a wealthy businessman and lives a humdrum life in the small town of Blaye in southwestern France. After indirectly witnessing a murder in a café, she returns to the scene of the crime the next day and meets Chauvin (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who she begins to believe intends to kill her.

Moderato Cantabile is an obscure and arty, long-forgotten film, not negligible but lacking enough interest, excitement and lustre. Honourable though it is, it can be a rather dreary and wearisome experience, but it is now best remembered for the outstanding performance by Jeanne Moreau which redeems it. It is a quietly compelling, brio tour-de-force. She is great, and Belmondo is good, but it is not much of a film.

Jean-Paul Belmondo replaced Richard Burton, who was to play the part speaking French, withdrawing at the eleventh hour claiming: ‘French unions objected at the last minute to a British actor appearing in an all-French production.’

The film struggled at the box office after its successful Paris run, but it did get released belatedly in the US as Seven Days… Seven Nights in 1964.

Duras later said Brook ‘made the film beautifully’ but Belmondo had a different take: ‘It was very boring. Like Antonioni’s films, Marguerite Duras’ script was full of hidden meanings. Everyone was looking something significant in every expression. You didn’t just drink a glass of wine. You asked yourself Why does she want me to drink it?’

Theatre director Peter Brook had directed Moreau in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on stage in Paris. His only previous film, The Beggar’s Opera (1952), had flopped, but Raoul Levy agreed to produce Moderato Cantabile and managed to secure the funding, despite wanting Simone Signoret to star and being talked into Jeanne Moreau instead by Brook.

The cast are Jeanne Moreau as Anne Desbarèdes, Jean-Paul Belmondo as Chauvin, Pascale de Boysson as bar owner, Jean Deschamps as M Desbarèdes, Didier Haudepin as Pierre, Colette Régis as Miss Giraud, and Valeric Dobuzinsky as Assassin.

Moderato Cantabile was a very popular novel, selling half a million copies, and the source of Duras’s initial fame.

Moderato cantabile is a term used in music to describe a tempo that is moderately paced and has a lyrical, melodic quality.

RIP Jeanne Moreau (23 January 1928 – 31 July 2017). Her most notable movies include: Touchez Pas au Grisbi (1954), Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (1958), The Lovers (1958), Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte (1961), François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962), The Bride Wore Black (1968), Luis Buñuel’s The Diary of a Chambermaid, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle, Orson Welles’s The Trial, The Immortal Story and Chimes at Midnight, The Sailor from Gibraltar (1967), Mata Hari, Agent H21  (1964), Losey’s Eva (1962), Monte Walsh (1970), Bay of Angels [La baie des anges] (1963), Viva Maria! (1965), Moderato cantabile [Seven Days… Seven Nights] (1960) and The Old Lady Who Walked in the Sea in 1992.

She won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress for Moderato cantabile [Seven Days… Seven Nights] (1960), the BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actress for Viva Maria! (1965), and the César Award for Best Actress for The Old Lady Who Walked in the Sea (1992).

© Derek Winnert 2024 – Classic Movie Review 12,910

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